EnviroMom: Mulching veggie garden with coffee grounds

You may be thinking: “Wow. That EnviroMom must have one heck of a big dog to fill a bread bag half full with dog poop.” But that would not be the case. We don’t have a dog! And I haven’t turned into such an EcoFreak that I’m gathering up the dog poop of others.

This is a bag of coffee grounds. Collected by my husband from his workplace, and delivered to our home via bicycle in a reused bread bag (how’s that for green?). We are a family that takes some ribbing for it, but hates to see anything go to waste. That is why we triumphantly brought home the extra cake from a picnic we attended last Saturday chanting “We won the cake!” after the hostess sheepishly asked if she could beg us to take it off her hands. Well, no problem there. We ascribe to the “Leave no cake behind” theory.

Now that theory has been applied to coffee grounds. Years ago, while I was making feeble attempts at gardening, a friend suggested I use coffee grounds as an organic slug barrier around tender plants. A new friend — a highly successful backyard gardener in my pilates class — has reaffirmed the coffee grounds treatment. Now, I’ll admit my past application of coffee grounds was fairly feeble (equal only to my gardening of a few years’ ago), and was not successful. It seemed to have no impact on my slugs, who just plowed on through. But this friend insists it works. She says she gets coffee grounds by the wheelbarrow-ful from Starbucks.

Any rational person might have headed down to their local coffee shop to ask for a big helping of coffee grounds (“Hands up in the air, barista! Give me all the coffee grounds, and no one gets hurts!”). But no. Not me! I’m not a frequenter of coffee shops, so that isn’t my style. Instead my dear husband has volunteered to bike it up to our house one day at a time, relieving his office of their coffee ground waste. It looks like a lot in the bag, but once I apply it to the garden, it looks rather small. So we may need to resort to going to a coffee shop after all. I’d better work on a more diplomatic way of asking…

Happy Earth Day everyone! Welcome to the EnviroMom community if you are a new reader. Here at Enviromom, we celebrate and live like every day is Earth Day. Now that you’re here, let me ask. Would you care for some fair-trade, shade-grown, organic coffee? I’d love to brew you a cup… My lettuces and spinach may depend on it.